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OTTAWA—Tom Mulcair knows the first rule of the political battleground is never underestimate your adversary.

So it should not be a surprise when, during a recent conversation in his Centre Block office, he raises, unsolicited, the good, solid “branding” of the Conservative party and pays tribute to the intelligence and debating prowess of Stephen Harper.

But after nine months as opposition leader, Mulcair and his NDP are holding their own with the Conservatives.

The federal party went into 2012 reeling and leaderless, but they end the year still solidly entrenched as the alternative to Harper’s Conservatives.

The government side has tried to goad him as “Angry Tom,” they continually harp on about the “big union bosses” to which they say he is beholden and the carbon tax they repeatedly accuse him of preparing to inflict on voters.

Mulcair dismisses it all as the refuge of a government with no answers, only tired talking points.

“All Canadians are seeing is a very strong opposition leader standing up to a very strong prime minister,” he says. “They’re not going to sit us down. There is no way they are going to intimidate us.”

Words from Mulcair tend to gush, as if sprayed from a fire hose. He talks like he is double-parked, his words cascading, his answers sometimes meandering this way and that, farther and farther from the question.

But in the House of Commons, he has remained focused.

Two-thirds of his questions since becoming leader have dealt with the economy as he attempts to build the case that his party can be trusted, for the first time, with the keys to the treasury in 2015 while chipping away at the Conservative brand as the stolid overseers of the public purse.

“They love being in power,” he says of the Conservatives, “(but) they hate governing. They don’t take the time, they don’t follow the rules, they are disdainful of the public administration, the civil service, they mock them, they don’t listen to them and they wind up making huge mistakes like the F-35.”

The next election will not be decided from Question Period debates, but the Mulcair-Harper encounters in the daily Ottawa forum show much about both men.

“We are both people who deliver a very strong political fight and he is facing, for the first time, a very strong opposition,” Mulcair says. “I do recognize that he is a very capable debater, very capable. He stays more scripted than I thought, he stays with his talking points.”

But Mulcair analyzes his adversary, claiming that he knows he has yanked Harper away from those talking points when the prime minister does not turn his back on the opposition leader, button his jacket, turn to the speaker and deliver his response.

It is a tactic favoured by Harper in the 2011 election debates when he spoke directly to the camera, ignoring Jack Layton and Michael Ignatieff.

“He’s disdainful, he turns his back on us. So the few times I have made him spin around and turn and look at me, I know I am scoring more than usual.”

Mulcair quickly triggered controversy in 2012, arguing that the lack of sustainable development of the oilsands was “hollowing out” the manufacturing sector in central Canada and artificially inflating the Canadian dollar, a move his Conservative opponents branded as divisive.

If he has one regret in 2012, it was referring to Premiers Brad Wall and Alison Redford as Harper’s “messengers,” a poor choice of words, Mulcair now says.

But he never wavered from the core of his argument.

“I’m going to run the next campaign, visor-up, straight on about sustainable development, about the obligation for any government to look at the environmental, economic and social impact of every decision they make,” he says.

To do otherwise, he says, is to saddle the next generation, already looking at larger deficits and meagre pensions, with the cost of environmental cleanups.

It is the 18-to-25-year-old voter pool he is targeting. He sent his young crew of MPs to university campuses right after the last election and he continues to reach out to the 65 per cent of that age group that did not vote in the last election.

It may be the same pool in which a Justin Trudeau-led Liberal party will be fishing, but right now, that is not a concern for the opposition leader.

“I believe passionately Canadians will follow us down that path,” Mulcair says.

Tim Harper is a national affairs writer. His column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. tharper@thestar.ca

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